Teen who died in accident had local ties

Traffic was stalled on both Route 66 and I-40 after an accident Friday took the life of a local teen.

Wednesday, November 18, 2015By Leota Harriman

A teenager was killed in an accident involving a semi truck Friday on Interstate 40, according to the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s spokesman, Sgt. Aaron Williamson.

The Sheriff’s department has not yet released the driver’s name, identifying him only as a 16-year old. But an email sent out by East Mountain High School on Tuesday identified the youth as Riley Hein, who was a junior at Manzano High School, and had attended both A. Montoya Elementary and Roosevelt Middle School.

East Mountain High School had a social worker available for students who want to talk about the young man’s death.

The accident between the semi truck and passenger car happened around 6 a.m., and led to the car becoming “trapped under the semi trailer and dragged approximately a quarter of a mile,” Williamson wrote in an email to The Independent, adding, “When deputies arrived on scene, the trailer was fully engulfed in flames. The driver of the passenger car was pronounced deceased on scene.”

Williamson said an investigation is ongoing, and at this time no charges are pending.

The accident tied up traffic on both I-40 and Route 66 for at least 12 hours, with people reporting the trip to Albuquerque from the Edgewood and Moriarty area taking an hour and a half to three hours in the morning, and with even longer waits reported during the evening rush hour.

“The reason that there was still a traffic jam 12 hours later is we had to completely unload the trailer of frozen and thawed bread dough to recover the body of the 16 year old driver,” Williamson said.

According to comments on Facebook, Hein was on his way to school, where he played trombone in the school’s marching band, at the time of the crash.